Near the entrance, by a booth, there is a donkey got up in scarlet-lined reins studded with brass nails. He is one of those donkeys from Sardinia, the Peter Pans among donkeys; that is to say, he is only half the size of ordinary donkeys. Like all donkeys, he has a self-sufficient and humorous look, as though he were enjoying a private joke of his own. He is harnessed to a little carriage.

His keeper tells me that the donkey is hired out to children for a trot round the garden for thirty lire a run. Donkeys for the delectation of children are a common sight in Italy, and every time I come across one I contemplate it with an aching heart. Why is it taken for granted that only children enjoy donkey rides? I am certain that many grown-ups would appreciate them too. This is one of life's injustices. I content myself with stroking the donkey, and engage in a talk with the keeper. He is an old man, seething with indignation. It seems that the donkey earns a lot of money, but the donkey's owner pockets it all and does not give the animal enough to eat. Last year they had a goat for the carriage but the goat got tired.

I am expected to make a comment, and so I say: "It is a good thing, really. Goats aren't half as nice as donkeys."

"How do you know?" growls the keeper; "have you ever had a goat?"

"No."

"Then, how can you make such a statement?"

"I just imagined it, you know."

"That's not good enough. If you don't know goats, you shouldn't have opinions about them."

He talks nonsense, of course. I don't have to keep a goat in order to find out my feelings about them. I know I dislike them. And if I had a goat, my dislike would probably grow into hatred. Before we part he had made me promise to be fairer to goats in future.

I once talked to some Italians who complained about the lack of education in their country. "The people have no culture," they said; "you wouldn't believe it, how many people still do not know how to read and write."

"I quite believe it," I said, "but when you eat at the tiniest inn your table is laid with a white linen cloth and you are given a large, white, heavy linen napkin. And when you order fruit the cherries and apricots are not brought on a plate, a mere handful, but generously piled in a dish and floating in iced water. To me, this is real culture and real education."

The waiter comes with the coffee and I show him the leaflet and ask his opinion. He looks at the picture and reads some of the text.

He is not favourably impressed. "It is not a good book," he says. I am as convinced of it as he is, but I am curious to know how he arrived at his judgment.

I say: "What makes you think it is bad?"

"Because it is stupid. The stupidity stands out a mile. Look at it. She comming to the wedding. What good will that do to her? Couldn't the writer have thought of something more intelligent?"

"Still, he got a story out of it," I say; "it is very hard getting a story out of anything, even if it is a silly one."

"That could well be," says the waiter. "I have never thought about it before, but I see what you mean. My friend Sandro got a girl into trouble too, but you couldn't make a story out of it."

"I'm sure you couldn't," I say, "because there was probably nothing more to it."

"Well, I wouldn't say that," remarks the waiter; "there was quite a lot to it. Sometimes, I almost think it could be made into a story—anyway—half of it—because it gave us so many surprises. To begin with, we none of us thought that Sandro would ever change his way of life. He was a bachelor, at the time it happened he was already forty, and he lived in the house of two old maids who looked after him very well. They even darned his socks. And he never wanted to get married at all. He got all the women he wanted, as it was.

"Then he had this love-affair and he got the girl into trouble, and when the child was well on the way he said suddenly that he would stand by her and that he was going to marry her. I said to him, and all the others said to him: 'Look here, you are too settled on your ways, you don't know what it is like getting married at your time of life. Don't force yourself into it if you don't feel like it.' But Sandro swore he was fond of her and he had made up his mind and was going to marry her. So, that was a bit of a surprise, wasn't it? Almost good enough for a story."

"Well," I say, "Sandro sounds a decent man. But in a story you cannot have things as straightforward as that and as pleasant, you know. You must get a hitch somewhere. Now, in a novel, Sandro would have turned a deaf ear to the girl's entreaties and——"

"But, I am telling you," says the waiter, "it was very odd in its own life-like way. Sandro said he'd marry her and the girl was happy and he was happy, do you see."

"Yes, I see," I say, "but that's not odd enough for a story. If you do not get a complication you have nothing to write about. Now, if they were both happy, what would there be to write about?"

"But there was a complication. A dreadful, mysterious one," says the waiter. "As soon as Sandro made his decision he began to feel ill. He could not eat and he could not sleep, and he grew pale and lost weight. He went to see his doctor, and the doctor examined him and could not find anything wrong. An yet, Sandro was in a terrible way. We all saw it, and we said to him: 'Look here, this marriage is simply preying on your mind. You are not cut up for marriage. Give the girl some money and be nice to her, but leave her alone.' The doctor, too, said the same. But Sandro wouldn't listen to our advice and he got worse and worse. The doctor told him to take a holiday, and Sandro went to Montecatini for a month, and when he came back he was a changed man, wonderfully well and happy.

"So we all said to him: 'There you are, you had a good time and you didn't think of the girl and you recovered. So, for Heaven's sake, give it up, we all know you are decent at heart but it was just not meant to be, and your very being revolts against the idea.' He would not listen to us and, sure enough, he went into a decline once more and simply wasted away before our eyes and had to postpone the wedding because he was in a dreadful state.

"He went to the doctor again and again; the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with him, and told him it was all due to worry and that he should give up the girl."

"That's terribly interesting," I say. "And, you know, this really could have been in a novel because it's all psychological and it would make a lovely story to show that one shouldn't force oneself to be decent. One could make a point about the laws of conventional decency and about the laws of inner decency, peculiar to each man, and how the two decencies get into conflict, and——"

"It wasn't like this at all," says the waiter. "I know Sandro, and I know he is a nice man through and through, and there was no inner decency in him peculiar to himself, and so I said to him: 'Go to the doctor again, and tell him if he cannot find anything the matter with you, you won't pay his bill, and you'll go to the competition.' And Sandro went again, and the doctor did some thinking and then he cut a strand of Sandro's hair and took some clippings off Sandro's nails."

The waiter pauses, and I remain silent. My head is in a whirl. What is this, now? I suppose the doctor was going to do some black-magic ritual with hair and nails and livers of frogs killed at midnight. I am sure the doctor diagnosed Sandro as a heavy histeric, and was going to try some suggestion, by magic, to cure him. Terribly clever, of course. So well calculated to impress the mind of a simple man.

And once more the waiter's tale takes a completely unexpected turn.

"The doctor put those clippings in an envelope and send them by registered mail to Milan, to the Institute of Pathology, and the report came back that they had found large quantities of arsenic in them.

"So, first of all the doctor told Sandro to eat all his meals out and not to say a word to anybody and he got in touch with the police. It was all as clear as could be. The two old ladies had cherished Sandro and they had not wanted to lose him, and they preferred to see him dead rather than alive and married. And this was proved by the fact that Sandro had recovered at once when he was away in Montecatini, and had got sick again at once as soon as he was back home."

"Ghastly," I say, "and I suppose, to look at them, they were dear, gentle old souls who crocheted lace mats and had all their vases filled with flowers?

"You are right," says the waiter, "to look at them they are dear old souls. Would you like to see them?"

"No, thank you," I say, "I don't particularly want to travel to Rome just to visit the criminal loony bin."

"But you are wrong," remarks the waiter. "They are here, in Cremona, in their own house."

"Really? You said the doctor called the police at once."

"So he did. The police came straight away, within an hour, with a search warrant. The two old ladies opened the door to the police very sweetly, and offered to make them a cup of coffee, but the police excused themselves with a shudder, saying that they had no time for coffee. They searched the house and the grounds the way the police do, you know, floorboards and mattresses and the hems of curtains and the lavatory cistern. There was not a grain of arsenic in the place. They took with them samples of the spaghetti and the sugar and other provisions in the house and had it all analysed, and there was nothing that could be determined, except just spaghetti and sugar and so on and perhaps a dead fly or two. And they made inquiries at drug-stores and chemists and traced the old ladies' movements and searched everywhere where they might have obtained arsenic in some form, but they couldn't find anything in the least suspicious.

"Sandro moved to his girl's place and married her and has been well and happy ever since. And the two old ladies are well and happy too, only they haven't got another boarder. Nobody would dare. You know what people are like—they talk. And yet—it is a mistery. Nothing was ever explained. That is why it would never do for a story."

What is there for me to say? The waiter in all his humility has given me the skeleton of a story worthy of Maupassant, with the brutality, the absence of moral judgement, the utterly compelling truth which only the master can produce. But I cannot tell him so, he has never heard of the master.

"Still, it has a happy ending," I remark, fully aware how trite this is.

"Yes, it has a happy ending," says the waiter, "because nobody was interfered with and they were all allowed to go on with this thing which we call life."

Here is my recipe for finding a restaurant in a strange provincial town in Italy: think of the town as a tree, with the Corso as trunk and the inevitable Via Roma and Via Vitorio Veneto as the big branches. Turn from one side street into a yet smaller back street, branch off into an alley and walk, if possible, through a passage connecting two courtyards, and you will find the restaurants hidden like birds' nests in the thinnest boughs.

I tell the waiter that I do not want pasta, in any shape or disguise, and he takes the blow without flinching. He offers me coppa instead. What is coppa? I want to see for myself. I see him enter a pantry and open an ice-box, one of those huge old-fashioned monuments to coolness with four separate doors and nickel hinges and panels pierced with holes arranged like stars. We had one like this at home, when I was very small, in the days when we pickled our own cucumbers and dried our own mushrooms.

He brings me on a board the lesser half of a charming looking sausage with a leathery outside and a face the size of a saucer. A minute later he serves it, carved in thin rounds, almost transparent, deep crimson, marbled with glossy white lard. It tastes rather like cured ham, but it has a more robust flavour. He tells me that the coppa is made in only two places in Italy, here in Cremona and in Parma. The Parmesan coppa is sweeter, the Cremonese racier, he thinks.

When my mother was a young girl she came to London for a few weeks and one day, while travelling on the Underground, she glanced idly about her in the way people do when they are bored. Looking straight ahead of her she saw a pair of feet belonging to the woman on the seat opposite, and the longer my mother looked at those feet the more she felt that they were quite outstandingly lovely and that she had never seen such beautiful feet before in all her life. She looked up to see to whom those feet belonged. It was Pavlova.

It is a strange thing: I wonder how it is. I never get tired of mediocre Romanesque churches or of palaces built in the provincial Venetian Gothic style. But when it comes to Baroque it is a case like the little girl with the little curl on her forehead; when she was good she was very, very good, but when she was not she was horrid.

"And now," says the professor, "we come to a point of Cremonese history which will interest you more than anything else I have told you so far."

It was like this: In the beginning of the eighteenth century Cremona was under French rule, with a military governor called Villeroi.

At that time the Austrians had Prince Eugène as their field-marshal. He was the greatest soldier they ever had. Actually, Prince Eugène had first wanted to become a priest, but later on he had decided to join the army. As he was French, a native of Savoy, he went to the King of France to offer his services. Prince Eugène was a small, slight, ugly young man, and when he presented himself to the King, the King started to laugh and said something like: "What, you miserable little seedy weedy abbé, you want to be a soldier? This is priceless."

So Prince Eugène went off in a huff, and went to the Austrians, who took him on, and he became one of the greatest military leaders of all time. The French King was livid about it, but then it was too late.

One of Prince Eugène's campaigns was against Cremona, during the War of the Spanish Succession, when he planned to take Cremona for the Austrians. On the second of February, 1702, he reached the town. He did not have to fight a battle, because the French military never expected him to come, and the garrison just folded up when they saw him. Thus he took Cremona without making a disturbance, and the governor, General Villeroi, never showed his face. By the time it was all over it was already night, and Prince Eugène thought the time had come to get hold of Villeroi and to acquaint him with the news.

Prince Eugène took with him only a few men, and they crept in the dark to the governor's residence, which was the house of Stradivarius, the famous maker of violins. They entered the house, walked into the bedroom, and found the governor in bed but not asleep, and in the company of one of the ladies of Cremona, and Prince Eugène made him his prisoner there and then. This incidente became known as "the Surprise of Cremona". The General became the laughing-stock of the whole of Europe, and innumerable pictures were drawn, lampoons and songs were composed, and mock-heroic epics were written to commemorate the episode.

"This is the true 'Surprise of Cremona'," says the professor; "mark it well. Because you will not find it recorded in English books of history."

"Do they supress it?" I ask with indignation.

"I did not know you care so much for historic truth," remarks the professor. "No, they do not supress it. They cannot do so. Because it is a decisive point in history. They mention the 'Surprise of Cremona' and explain that the name is derived by the fact that the garrison was caught napping."